In the first 5 years after its introduction in the United States in 1999, West Nile virus (WNV) spread to the 48 contiguous states, resulting in 667 reported deaths. To establish detection and response capacity, WNV surveillance and prevention was supported through CDC Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity (ELC) cooperative agreements with all 50 states and six large cities/counties. In 2005, th...

therosclerosis is increasing among Japanese because of their changing lifestyle.1 Carotid ultrasound examination is a good non-invasive method of detecting atherosclerosis by measuring the intima–media thickness (IMT),2 plaque number (PN) and plaque score (PS).3 Atherosclerosis of the carotid artery is related with not only coronary artery disease (CAD),4,5 but also systemic atherosclerosis. Ho...

We have previously demonstrated that the myosin essential light chain (ELC) is required for myosin function in a Dictyostelium cell line, 7-11, in which the expression of ELC was inhibited by antisense RNA overexpression. We have now disrupted the gene encoding the ELC (mlcE) in Dictyostelium by gene targeting. The mlcE- mutants provide a clean genetic background for phenotypic analysis and bio...

The relative movement of the catalytic and regulatory domains of the myosin head (S1) is likely to be the force generating conformational change in the energy transduction of muscle [Rayment, I., Holden, H. M., Whittaker, M., Yohn, C. B., Lorenz, M., Holmes, K. C., and Milligan, R. A. (1993) Science 261, 58-65]. To test this model we have measured, using frequency-modulated FRET, three distance...

The essential myosin light chain (ELC) is involved in modulation of force generation of myosin motors and cardiac contraction, while its mechanism of action remains elusive. We hypothesized that ELC could modulate myosin stiffness which subsequently determines its force production and cardiac contraction. Therefore, we generated heterologous transgenic mouse (TgM) strains with cardiomyocyte-spe...

The functional significance of the actin-binding region at the N terminus of the cardiac myosin essential light chain (ELC) remains elusive. In a previous experiment, the endogenous ventricular ELC was replaced with a protein containing a 10-amino acid deletion at positions 5-14 (ELC1vDelta5-14, referred to as 1vDelta5-14), a region that interacts with actin. 1vDelta5-14 mice showed no discerna...

Introduction: Acute cholecystitis is a relatively common complication of gallstones It can lead to significant morbidity and mortality from potentially life-threatening complications such as empyema, gallbladder gangrene and gallbladder perforation It presents as a surgical emergency and usually requires hospitalization for management Laparoscopic cholecystectomy is advocated for acute cholecys...

Cardiac hypertrophy represents one of the most important cardiovascular problems yet the mechanisms responsible for hypertrophic remodeling of the heart are poorly understood. In this report we aimed to explore the molecular pathways leading to two different phenotypes of cardiac hypertrophy in transgenic mice carrying mutations in the human ventricular myosin essential light chain (ELC). Mutat...

Differentiation-dependent thymocyte migration in the thymus may be important for T lymphopoiesis and might be regulated by thymic chemoattractants. We examined modulation of chemotactic responsiveness of thymocyte subsets during their early to late stages of development in response to 2 thymus-expressed chemokines, SDF-1 and CKbeta-11/MIP-3beta/ELC. SDF-1 shows chemotactic preference for immatu...

We show that a rectangular metallic waveguide loaded with metamaterial elements consisting of electric-field-coupled (ELC) resonators placed at the sidewalls can operate well below the cutoff frequency of the respective unloaded waveguide. For the example considered of a waveguide with square cross-section and original TE-mode cut-off frequency at 16.67 GHz (under no loading), a TE-mode passban...